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Two reputational details precede Govanhill bakery two eight seven: the queue and the review.
Let’s start with the queue. It forms at weekends, as early as 8.40am. Hungry punters mill on the corner of Langside Road in suspense. “Nowhere else deals with queues quite like that, rain or shine,” says Kate, a curator and Southside bakery regular. At 9am, the blue sign hanging in the bakery’s steamed-up window flips from ‘closed’ to ‘open’. Anyone who has seen the enormous line would surely assume two eight seven is an unqualified success. But what the owners, Anna and Sam Luntley, have created has become part of a growing battle in Glasgow’s Southside over who gets to call where ‘home’.
As for the review, well, we’ll get to that later.
I’m no foodie, but two eight seven promptly makes it onto my radar. The place is catnip for press and has been lauded as one of the best bakeries in the UK, if not the world. It’s artisan and organic, with a focus on local ingredients and low-waste food production (think wholemeal pizzetta dough made from recycled bread). The Herald pronounce the Luntleys “the Beatles of baking”. Yes, the fluffy focaccia is dressed with swede and pickled walnuts. Yes, the Instagram page is beautiful.
But in Glasgow, two eight seven provokes such heightened emotions, that even a recent transplant to the city (me) catches wind of the complaints. Frankly, this only makes me more curious. The Luntleys (or those “low effort chancers”, according to Robert, 30) elicit similar levels of dislike as they do adulation. So why exactly are people in Govanhill feeling so much about bread?
Pre-reporting, the impression I was given of two eight seven was familiar: a pretentious “hipster” bakery, run by London blow-ins like myself, that had plonked itself in one of the most deprived areas of Glasgow and only catered to a crowd of equally trendy out-of-towners.
This is certainly how Robert, an English civil servant, sees things. “During Covid there were a few cases of people coming to Glasgow from London or Manchester with this presumption that Scotland didn't really have any culture or sophistication, and they were doing us a favour by opening very average bakeries, cafes and bookshops,” he tells me. “I thought it had that air about it.” Robert moved to Govanhill in 2012.
“It just doesn't feel like it's serving the community if all it's doing is fancy coffees and pastries, two days a week,” says Doug, 35. He really does not like two eight seven, evidenced by the fact our phone call lasts 45 minutes. Doug’s list of charges is long and, like others, he invokes the word ‘community’ a lot. For Doug, this doesn’t mean the “Instagram brunch crowd,” as he calls the bakery’s customers, but people who work the sort of trades that will miss leisurely weekend opening hours. The “optics” of a fancy bakery in an area riven with food poverty, are bad, he believes. He makes a lot of assertions about the Luntleys. “I don't even need to hear them talk to know they're from London,” Doug says.
Unhappily for Doug, the Luntleys aren’t actually from London. They’re from Leamington Spa, and moved to Govanhill in 2011 after studying in Edinburgh. They worked in the city before relocating, first as artists’ assistants and then as bakers learning their trade, putting in shifts in kitchens ranging from the Fullarton Hotel to Kember and Jones. The longest they’ve spent in London is the three months in the autumn of 2011 that Sam did at Bermondsey’s Little Bread Pedlar bakery, a stint that introduced him to croissant-making.
two eight seven is their second Glasgow bakery. The first was bakery47, opened in 2013 on Victoria Road, beginning as a delivery-only. The Luntleys were reluctant to open a physical space; their home kitchen “cottage industry” was significant, says Anna. “We didn't want to become another cafe where people, without thinking, came and picked up their products”.
But council funding and space (an abandoned Chinese takeaway) came up, so bakery47 was born, open four days a week. It was an instant hit, pioneering a specific artisan approach that every foodie I ask says certainly wasn’t present in Govanhill, and maybe not even wider Glasgow, prior to the venture.
“We were trying to create something which had a West End feel in a really poor community,” Anna says. “Always, we were trying to make sure that we weren't taking the piss out of that, and that we were for everybody.” They ran bread bartering programmes, set up pay-it-forward schemes and invited local makers to use the space for free to conduct craft sessions.
“They were definitely doing something that others weren't,” says Tori Clerk, a Glasgow native. She became a fan, buying goods regularly and attending workshops. People would turn up to bakery47 in trackies, she remembers. Not anymore: two eight seven attracts “more hipsters and less friendliness,” says Tori, noting she now frequently feels the lone person with a “working-class Glaswegian accent” when queuing. “But that’s not Sam and Anna’s fault.”
bakery47’s hype would thrill many business owners. The Luntleys were uneasy. Anna recalls one family who said they’d come up on the night bus from London to try the pastries. “We didn't want that,” she says. “We wanted it to be the people on our doorstep.”
Customer demographics weren’t the only thing changing: as bakery47’s success grew, so did the couple’s thousand yard stares. Tori noticed the Luntleys becoming “more tired and not as enthusiastic”.
“I used to stand crying making cakes,” Anna tells me. Five evenings a week, the pair would labour in the kitchen until midnight when an alarm reminded them they were required back there in three hours.
The stress was all-consuming. Anna had a calendar counting down the days until they could exit their lease. For most of bakery47’s lifespan, the couple claim, they were taking home around £200 a month after expenses. When they finally closed and sold their kit, they said “never again”. For a year, they travelled, working in kitchens from Copenhagen to India. Doug refers to this as a “big, mad, long sabbatical, adding “it’s a bit offensive for you to be airdropping yourself in and taking yourself out.” The Luntleys say it re-inspired them.
Returning to Glasgow in 2020, the Luntleys had no intention of starting another bakery – or even staying in the city. But then they were approached by two former bakery47 staffers, who’d started their own venture, Flower, in premises on Langside Road. Flower’s owners couldn’t make it work and wanted out – would Sam and Anna take over the lease, they asked?
At first the answer was an emphatic “no thanks”. But the Luntleys reconsidered. They were already baking, just for other people, and were itching for a chance to put all they’d learned while away, from technique to ethos, into practice. Maybe one last Glasgow hurrah? This time, it would be open two days a week, to avoid the burnout of bakery47, and to counteract 24/7 consumerism culture. “Just doing the weekend [means] people are excited to come, and keeps it special,” explains Anna.
Which brings us to the review. It appeared six months ago on two eight seven’s Google listing, under the name ‘jamie madden’.
“Never open” it read. “Over priced. At it. Bit of west end / gentrification for Govanhill if you’re into that.” The appraisal was accompanied by a one star ranking. (I reached out to Jamie Madden for comment but he declined to answer).
Harsh. The Luntleys say they had never had feedback so negative before. They felt the need to explain themselves, and did so, in a 359 word response, typed all in lowercase, a deliberate choice as it was “more fluid”. They also posted it on Instagram.
Within a month, the review and its lengthy reply had hit Glasgow’s dedicated Reddit page, posted under the title ‘Hipster Govanhill Bakery goes on rant on Google Reviews’. two eight seven critics I speak to remember it clearly; it forms a cornerstone of their distaste – Doug says it was his final straw for writing the bakery off. Interestingly, they all seem to attach authorship to Sam, even though it was Anna who posted it, after some joint workshopping. City-wide virality brought a spotlight to two eight seven; someone even came in and referred to it as the “Reddit bakery,” Sam bitterly recounts.
While the Luntleys received strong support from regulars and many bakeries they had formed an international network with via social media (like Quince in London and Ten Belles in Paris), they’d also unwittingly volunteered themselves as tribute for a growing politics of resentment.
Accusations followed included that the couple were trust fund babies, that their baking was just a little hobby. Someone called them “champagne socialists” which is funny because if you speak to the Luntleys for more than five minutes, it’s clear these people would never do anything as vulgar as attaching themselves to a political ideology they could betray.
The Luntleys can be reticent; during our two-hour interview, Sam occasionally veers into spiky. Anna is naturally shy. But after our sit down, and spending three hours watching them work in the kitchen (where they both relax, Sam cracking jokes), their motivation is clear: what they care about, ultimately, is baking beautiful, thoughtful food for anybody who wants it.
At times, they are clumsy. After years online, I can spot an opportunity for critique like no one’s business. At one point, Anna defends the presence of highly-priced ceramics by saying they give people who can “only afford a £1 cup of tea” a “bit of self-worth”, but I know what she’s trying to say. Darryl Docherty from Short Long Black, a nearby coffee shop that several people I speak to hold up as the platonic good (Darryl is Govanhill born and bred) to two eight seven’s incursion, articulates it later.
“Are working class people [not] allowed to enjoy these things?” he asks. When he opened in his childhood neighbourhood, Darryl, who “grew up in schemes”, also received accusations of betraying the spirit of the area. “It's almost like gatekeeping poverty. We want to make people from my class perpetual victims. It’s not something that sits right.”
I ask Doug about some of the efforts the Luntleys have made towards lower-income Govanhill residents, such as their pay-it-forward bread scheme, and their work with food charities like The People’s Pantry and Plant Grow Share. He’s unmoved.
“I don't know whether that comes from a place of actually feeling that was something they had to do, or whether it was just because the community would have turned on them faster because there is a degree of tone deafness to [opening the shop there]” he says.
When I press any of the two eight seven detractors harder though, the real targets of their ire shine through: a recent wave of Londoners moving to Govanhill. They don’t care about Londoners moving to the West End (allowed), or East (like me). But Londoners coming to the Southside? Get out. (This anti-London hostility goes for two eight seven devotees too; when I ask a former chef at Glasgow School of Art for an interview on Facebook, he sends an extremely terse reply, blocks me and then posts in the local Govanhill Go! group, warning everyone not to talk to the “London-based journalist”. I am then also removed from the group).
“There’s a tangible negative effect to how many people from London are here,” says Doug, citing skyrocketing house prices. “It's undeniable hearing the accent everywhere in Govanhill. That definitely ties into the optics of why what two eight seven are doing irks people so badly”.
Sure, he adds, there’s natural waves of gentrification – he’s proof of that. “I'm a middle class guy, not from Glasgow, who moved to Govanhill years ago. I'm a tiny part of the reason there are so many bougie bakeries, but I guess at some point, there's just a tipping point where it goes too far.” I ask what his born-and-bred Govanhill friends think. He says he doesn’t have any.
When I interviewed people in the queue, like Doug (and the Luntleys), they were longtime Govanhill residents. One group told me they met in line for two eight seven, and now use the opportunity every week to sit at the little tables outside and catch up with each other. A young Scots/English couple, Sileas and Sam, say the Luntleys made their wedding cake. Orlando, a two eight seven patron I get on the phone, says he and Sam now go for the odd pint, a friendship built over sourdough. It should be stressed: this bakery is beloved by many.
Everyone seems very local and embedded. The problem is that who is local and embedded has changed over time. Several communities now live alongside each other, uneasily. It’s true lots of the impoverished working class that people gesture at have been priced out, says Darryl Docherty, who’s nearly 40. Some, like him, still live there, either getting on ok, or having fallen on harder times (he references a former classmate he sees begging outside supermarkets). But many peers, Docherty says, also left the Southside to escape the troubles associated with it. They don’t believe reports of its transformation.
As Orlando notes, two distinct Govanhill camps have formed in response to increasing living pressures. There’s opposition to international migration, found among rightwingers. And then there’s the leftwing version: opposition to internal UK migration, especially from London. The Luntleys, these artists turned bakers from Leamington Spa, are bemusedly caught in the middle.
But not for much longer; the bakery is closing for good at the end of November. Sam and Anna are off to pursue some different dreams, maybe start a guesthouse in France. Filling two eight seven’s physical shoes will be an independent coffee shop, which has already found success in Dennistoun. Govanhill’s increasing tensions didn’t force the Luntleys out but they contributed to their decision. “It definitely pushed me towards not being here anymore,” says Anna. “It made me question the community that was developing in the Southside of Glasgow, and the kind of value that people appreciate.”
The haters won’t blink an eyelid. But for the long-term fans and yes, community, the Luntleys have built over 13 years, there will be a croissant-shaped hole in Govanhill. “There isn't anything that fills the space that Sam and Anna created,” asserts Tori Clerk. Sam and Anna have taught many bakers in Glasgow their trade, observes Sileas, but two eight seven remains unique.
“There is no replacement,” says Orlando, sadly. “Maybe I’ll start making my own bread.”
This piece was amended on 6 November 2024 to correct the spelling of 'Flower', and to correct Doug's age, which is 35.
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